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Chapter 14
Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin Chiara Melloni University of Verona
Bianca Basciano Ca’ Foscari University of Venice In this chapter, we shed new light on the reduplicative processes of Mandarin Chinese and assess the structural and interpretive properties of the input/base and output of these word formation phenomena. In particular, we focus on the categorial status of the base and address the issue of whether reduplication applies to category-free roots or full-fledged lexemes. Empirically, the privileged domain of research is increasing reduplication of disyllabic bases, or, as we dub it in the chapter, the AABB pattern, which is compared with diminishing reduplication, expressed by the template ABAB. The comparison between the two phenomena allows us to show that increasing and diminishing reduplication differ in the nature of the input units involved. On the grounds of a wide-ranging class of data, we argue that Mandarin reduplication takes base units of different ‘size’: word/lexeme-like units provided with category, namely verbs in the case of diminishing reduplication, and categoryless roots in the case of increasing reduplication. Throughout the chapter, we explore some category neutral properties of increasing reduplication and propose a unitary semantic operation capable to derive the various interpretive nuances of this phenomenon across lexical categories.
1 Introduction 1.1 Lexemes vs. words and reduplication phenomena Lexemes are usually understood as sound/meaning pairs, i.e. linguistic signs provided with lexical category specification yet lacking inherent inflectional specification. Lexemes and words are thus considered as distinct entities in lexicalist approaches to word formation. As a matter of fact, while a word proper is a fully inflected entity functioning as a syntactic atom, a lexeme is the abstract version of the word-form lacking inflectional marking (Fradin & Kerleroux 2003). As put forward by Fradin & Kerleroux (2003), the Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano. Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin. In Olivier Bonami, Gilles Boyé, Georgette Dal, Hélène Giraudo & Fiammetta Namer (eds.), The lexeme in descriptive and theoretical morphology, 325–363. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1407013
Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano form of the lexeme can either be segmentally simple (viz. a root) or complex (viz. a stem), with affixal derivation, compounding and reduplication as phenomena possibly involved in lexeme formation. Reduplication phenomena, however, are particularly challenging under this approach, since cross-linguistically the functions of reduplication are very varied and difficult to place categorically within the derivational domain of lexemes. In fact, whereas derivation typically forms new lexemes and can be category changing, reduplication often conveys values typically found in the inflectional domain. Although reduplication is attested with a variety of meanings (and forms) across languages, this phenomenon is consistently associated with its prototypical (iconic) function of intensification. In its increasing value, reduplication in the nominal domain gives as a result plural nouns, and in the domain of verbs it usually conveys aspectual meanings, i.e. pluractionality, iterative or progressive aspect, which are features prototypically expressed by inflection markings in most Indo-European languages. With adjectives, the prototypical value is intensification of the property/quality expressed by the base adjective. Nevertheless, independently of its semantic values, reduplication manifests several properties of word/lexeme formation and, formally, approaches derivational phenomena. First of all, (full) reduplication consists in the iteration of simple or complex roots (viz. stems), since it may also involve complex objects, such as compounds. Crucially, however, it typically applies to uninflected bases, with inflectional marking, if any, applying outside of/after reduplication. Moreover, reduplication shows many properties of compounding, since it often induces a reanalysis of the stress or tonal pattern of its base, or the insertion of epenthetic material between the two iterating units and/or some other phonological readjustment. Further, semantic drift and idiosyncrasy can characterize the outputs of reduplicative processes, while inflection phenomena are very transparent at the interpretive level (see Forza 2011, for an enlightening typological perspective) . Therefore, under the lexeme/word distinction approach, we could argue that reduplication applies to roots or stems (traditionally understood as the phonological form of lexemes) and its domain of application is below the level of the word, or below X° in the standard X-bar approach.
1.2 Words, lexemes, and roots/stems in Mandarin Chinese If the concept of lexeme appears empirically motivated in fusional or agglutinating languages whereby inflection markers modify the word form conveying relevant features in the syntactic contexts, its motivation is less grounded in isolating languages, where (concrete) words occur with none or a very low number of inflection markers, typically show invariable form and are virtually indistinguishable from the corresponding (abstract) lexemes. Mandarin Chinese is one of those languages where words have little or no inflection and where lexemes, expressing the abstract representation of a word, cannot be distinguished from word forms on a formal basis. In Mandarin, the crucial distinction at the morphological level lies in the bound or free status of the root (a lexical morpheme), i.e. whether the root can ‘stand alone’ and occupy
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin a syntactic slot (1), equating thus free standing words in fusional languages, or whether it must be formally conjoined with another bound or free root, or with a derivational affix, to form an autonomous lexeme/word (2). (1)
free roots: 貓 māo ‘cat’, 走 zǒu ‘walk, run away’
(2) bound roots: 衣 yī ‘clothing, clothes’ , 毆 ōu ‘beat’ While the roots in (1) can be used by themselves in a sentence, those in (2) cannot stand alone but occur in complex words like e.g. 大衣 dà-yī ‘big-clothes, overcoat, topcoat’, 雨衣 yǔ-yī ‘rain-clothes, raincoat’, 衣櫃 yī-guì ‘clothes-cupboard, wardrobe’, 衣鉤 yīgōu ‘clothes-hook, clothes hook’ (Arcodia & Basciano 2017: 105-106). Due to a strong tendency towards disyllabification attested in the evolution of the Chinese language over the centuries (see Shi 2002: 70-72), most roots are nowadays bound in Standard Mandarin (about 70% according to Packard 2000). Therefore, the majority of words or lexemes are compounds or other types of morphologically complex forms, typically ranging over all major lexical categories. Another crucial aspect of Chinese morphology lies in the absence of strictly morphological criteria for the identification of the lexical category of roots (or stems, if morphologically complex), with some exceptions.1 As a matter of fact, no category-specific morphology (such as declension/conjugation class markers in fusional languages) can be deployed to partition roots into lexical classes, with a verb like 走 zǒu ‘walk, run away’ being virtually indistinguishable at the morphological level from a noun like 書 shū ‘book’ (see Basciano 2017). Since there are no reliable morphological criteria to identify lexemes as roots (or stems) endowed with lexical category features, the only reliable criterion is the distributional one. For instance, syntactic distribution only can discriminate among the adjectival, verbal or nominal use of a stem (namely, a combination of two roots) like 麻煩 máfan ‘annoying, bother, trouble’ (examples below from Basciano 2017: 561–562): (3)
1
a. 這件事很麻煩。 zhè jiàn shì hěn máfan this clf fact very troublesome ‘This fact is troublesome.’ b. 他不願麻煩别人。 tā bù-yuàn máfan biérén 3sg.m not-willing trouble others ‘He is unwilling to trouble other people.’ c. 你們在路上會遇到一些麻煩。 nǐ-men zài lù-shang huì yùdào yīxiē máfan 2sg-pl in street-on may/will meet some trouble ‘You may/will run into some troubles on the road.’
Examples are words containing suffixes such as 子 -zi, e.g. 刷子 shuāzi ‘brush’ (cf. 刷 shuā ‘to brush’), and 頭 -tou, e.g. 想頭 xiǎngtou ‘idea’ (cf. 想 xiǎng ‘to think’), which are always nouns (see Basciano 2017).
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano Thus, under the standard approach to lexemes proposed in 1.1, a relevant issue concerns the very existence of these units in the Chinese language where, at the lexical level, the very flexible distribution of lexical items seems to point in the direction of a lexicon whose base units (roots/stems) lack inherent category features. Moreover, the examples in (3) shed light on the need for a very loose semantics of roots/stems, arguably incompatible with the specific semantic meaning of lexemes, as proposed in Fradin & Kerleroux (2003). Under the hypothesis that roots bear no category specification, their meaning should be ‘vague’ enough to make it compatible with the adjectival, verbal or nominal meanings that might be instantiated in the syntax.2 We may remark, however, that the great flexibility observed in previous stages of the language has been largely reduced over the centuries, first with a functional specialization of lexemes during the Han period (206 BCE-220 CE), and then with the proliferation of compound words, whose functional preference has been always much more rigid and stable (see Zádrapa 2017). Even though cases of ‘regular ambiguity’ like the one in (3) are found, in Modern Chinese lexemes tend to be more fixed as far as lexical category and distribution are concerned; many roots have a ‘prototypical’ distribution and cannot be easily coerced into other lexical categories. However, even very stable words may be occasionally placed in syntactic slots usually occupied by other word classes, creating “innovative ambiguities” (Kwong & Tsou 2003: 116; see also Basciano 2017) . As observed by Zádrapa (2017), although it is not possible to distinguish on a formal basis the prototypical from the non-prototypical use, it is still possible to perceive a functional “strain” (or “pragmatic markedness” in Bisang’s 2008 terms), which always results in a semantic shift of varying dimension (see Croft 2001: 73).
1.3 Reduplication phenomena in Mandarin Chinese Among word formation phenomena in Mandarin, reduplication is one of the most productive and, as we will see throughout this chapter, it is found across all major lexical categories with both increasing (iconic) and diminishing (countericonic) values. Whereas there is no perfect correspondence between lexical categories and reduplication functions (verbs, for instance, can be reduplicated along one or the other function), we will see there is instead a tight correspondence between the structural pattern of reduplication and its diminishing or increasing value, so that the two patterns are rigidly differentiated at the segmental and suprasegmental level. In recent years there has been a growing attention to reduplication in Sinitic. In this chapter, we will try to shed new light on the reduplicative processes of Mandarin, and try to assess the structural and interpretive properties of the input (the bases of reduplication) and the output of reduplicative processes. In particular, we will focus on the question of the categorial status of the base of the reduplicative processes in Mandarin, i.e. what the base units are and, specifically, whether reduplication applies to category-less 2
In syntactic approaches to word formation such as Distributed Morphology, the meaning of a word emerges constructionally once the root has been categorized by a selecting head (n, v or a) in the course of syntactic derivation, and cannot be determined lexically.
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin roots or to full-fledged lexemes/words. Empirically, the privileged domain of research will be the increasing reduplication of disyllabic bases, or, as we dub it here, the AABB pattern, which will be compared with the diminishing pattern, characterized by the disyllabic template ABAB. The comparison between the two patterns will allow us to show that they differ in the type of units that constitute the basis of the reduplicative process. Mandarin reduplication, indeed, involves base units of different ‘size’, ranging from word/lexeme-like units provided with category and, namely, involving the verbal domain in the case of diminishing reduplication, to category-less roots in the case of increasing reduplication. Throughout the chapter, we will provide evidence for the latter claim, i.e. that reduplication phenomena involve roots, and we will explore some category neutral properties of increasing reduplication. We will conclude with some remarks on the semantic effects of this phenomenon, which we interpret as an increased measure function modifying the sortal type conveyed by the (combination of) roots.
1.4 Outline of the chapter The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 is dedicated to the presentation of the main patterns of full reduplication in Mandarin Chinese. Section 3 explores the characterizing features of increasing reduplication (AABB pattern) in some detail and discusses its formal and interpretive properties across lexical categories. Section 4 contains the structural analysis and some hypotheses about the semantics of AABB increasing reduplication, and section 5 draws the conclusions.
2 Data description 2.1 Reduplication in Mandarin: An overview Reduplication in Mandarin Chinese is a widespread and productive phenomenon, virtually affecting all major lexical categories (V, Adj, N) and showing a tight relation between structural patterns (form) and semantic meanings (function). Semantically, Mandarin reduplications have augmentative/increasing and diminishing functions that are rigidly associated with different structural and/or suprasegmental patterns. The diminishing function is only found in the verbal domain. Reduplicated verbs typically convey ‘delimitative’ or ‘tentative’ aspect (Chao 1968, Li & Thompson 1981, Tsao 2001), meaning to do something “a little bit/for a while” (Li & Thompson 1981: 29) or, by extension, to do something quickly, lightly, casually or just for a try.3 Both monosyllabic (A → AA) and disyllabic (AB → ABAB) bases can reduplicate, but only in the case of monosyllabic reduplication the morpheme 一 yi ( yǎotiǎo (Sagart 1999: 137).
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano b.
快樂 kuài-lè pleased-happy ‘happy’
→
快快樂樂 kuài~kuài-lè~lè pleased~pleased-happy~happy ‘very/really happy’
c.
高大 gāo-dà tall-big ‘tall and big’
→
高高大大 gāo~gāo-dà~dà tall~tall-big~big ‘very/really tall and big’
These data show that the disyllabic AABB template applies to complex bases that are structurally and semantically symmetrical, i.e. exocentric or coordinative structures lacking a clearly identifiable head. Adjectival reduplication, thus, seems to be conditioned by morphosyntactic (word-internal) factors. As for the output, the reduplicated adjective loses its gradability: while the base must be gradable, the reduplicated adjective is no longer gradable. As a matter of fact, whereas the (scalar) base adjective is compatible with degree modifiers such as ‘very’ and ‘fairly’, which indicate a high level on the scale of the (gradable) property expressed by the adjective they modify, the reduplicated adjective is not: (15)
a.
長 cháng ‘long’
→
非常長 fēicháng cháng ‘very long’
b.
長長 cháng~cháng ‘long~long’
→
* 非常長長 fēicháng cháng~cháng *‘very long~long’
Moreover, whereas the base adjective can appear in the comparative construction, the reduplicated adjective cannot: (16)
a. 我的頭髮比他的長。 wǒ de tóufa bǐ tā de cháng 1sg det hair comp 3sg.m det long ‘My hair is longer than his.’ b. * 我的頭髮比他的長長。 wǒ de tóufa bǐ tā de cháng~cháng 1sg det hair comp 3sg.m det long~long
However, there is a group of adjectives for which reduplication works differently. These are adjectives that typically involve a modifier-head structure, such as 雪白 xuě-bái ‘snow-white’, which reduplicates as ABAB (雪白雪白 xuě-bái~xuě-bái). The function is reportedly increasing, as in the case of AABB reduplicated adjectives. This might appear as an exception to the form-function identity between ABAB reduplication and diminish-
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin ing meaning in Mandarin.13 It must be noted, though, that modifier-head adjectives like 雪白 xuě-bái ‘snow-white’ are not gradable and, indeed, they are not compatible with degree adverbs and cannot be used in the comparative construction. Therefore, reduplication does not result in a change in gradability of the base adjective, as it is the case with AA and AABB adjectival reduplication. Adjectival ABAB reduplication, thus, seems to be a phenomenon distinct from the other patterns of reduplications described in this section. We will go back to this issue in section 3.5., when discussing the word/lexeme status of the bases of increasing reduplication.
3.2 Verbs As for verbs, increasing reduplication poses no aspectual requirements on the base unit since all kinds of verbs, including inherently telic verbs like 來 lái ‘come’, 進 jìn ‘enter’ or 出 chū ‘exit’, are allowed (see ex. (7), repeated here as (17c)). Nonetheless, increasing reduplication requires base units that possess specific structural properties. As a matter of fact, AABB increasing reduplication is generally possible only for coordinated complex verbs, the constituents of which may be either in a relation of logical coordination (17a), synonymy (17b) or antonymy (17c): (17)
a.
說笑 shuō-xiào talk-laugh ‘talk and laugh’
→
說說笑笑 shuō~shuō-xiào~xiào talk~talk-laugh~laugh ‘talk and laugh continuously’
b.
叫嚷 jiào-rǎng call-shout ‘shout, howl’
→
叫叫嚷嚷 jiào~jiào-rǎng~rǎng call~call-shout~shout ‘shout repeatedly’
c.
來往 lái-wǎng come-go ‘come and go’
→
來來往往 lái~lái-wǎng~wǎng come~come-go~go ‘come and go repeatedly, come and go in great numbers’
Note that in (17) the bases of reduplication are existing verbs, but this is not necessarily always the case, as e.g. 走走停停 zǒu~zǒu-tíng~tíng ‘walk and stop’ (there is no corresponding base verb 走停 zǒu-tíng).14 13
According to Paul (2010: 137, fn. 15), “[the] reduplication pattern for ‘modifier-adjectival head’ compounds deriving an adjective of the form [A° ABAB] is not to be confounded with the repetition of a disyllabic verb as a whole in syntax: [V° AB] [V° AB]”. 14 An alternative analysis might pose that verbal AABB reduplication is the result of the coordination of two reduplicated verbs, [A~A] [B~B]. However, note that since the reduplication of monosyllabic verbs expresses a delimitative meaning, the coordination of two monosyllabic reduplicated verbs should result in a delimitative semantics. Further, this analysis is not tenable because telic verbs like 來 lái ‘come’, as said above, cannot reduplicate by themselves, * 來來 lái~lái.
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano Also, it is worth remarking that the verbal reduplication pattern AABB may also be found with disyllabic monomorphemic verbs, such as (18a) or other kind of compound verbs (18b and 18c): (18)
a. 哆嗦 duōsuo ‘tremble’ b. 飄悠 piāo-you ‘float-long/leisurely, wobble, stagger’ c. 鬧騰 nào-teng ‘noisy-jump, disturb/create confusion’
As for the prosodic properties of the pattern, the second morpheme/syllable of noncoordinate compound verbs that can undergo AABB reduplication generally has the neutral tone, suggesting that these are lexicalized forms.15 Thus, similarly to adjectives, the AABB template in the verbal domain basically applies to structurally and semantically symmetrical bases, but it can also apply to unanalyzable morphemes or to lexicalized forms.16 For some of these lexicalized forms, it is possible that they originate from coordinating structures whose relationship became opaque with time, but an in depth diachronic analysis is needed to substantiate this hypothesis. As for the output, AABB reduplication of verbs seems to operate at the aspectual level, expressing repetition or action in progress. However, as we have seen, it can also express vividness (8), or other kinds of more abstract meanings (9), closely approaching adjectival reduplicative processes.
3.3 Nouns As we have seen, reduplicated monosyllabic nouns are said to have a ‘distributive’ or ‘plural collective’ meaning: (19) 人人都喜歡受人稱贊。 rén~rén dōu xǐhuan shòu rén chēngzàn person~person all like receive person praise ‘Everybody likes to be praised by people.’ 15
Toneless items in Chinese are typically grammatical morphemes, such as e.g. aspectual markers, (some) no longer productive derivational suffixes, and the second syllables of some reduplicated or compound words, as e.g. 爸爸 bàba ‘father’, 學生 xuésheng ‘student’. Thus, lack of tone is a clue of either grammaticalization or lexicalization. 16 The only constraint which does not seem to be morphological but rather aspectual concerns coordination of telic verbs: as we have seen, telic verbs may appear in the AABB pattern of reduplication, but if they do they must be antonyms (as in ex. 7/17c), i.e. reduplication of synonymic telic verbs does not seem to be possible (see Zhang 2016). This might be due to the fact that the coordination of two antonymic telic verbs (like enter-exit) results in the annulment of the télos, which seems to suggest that, actually, the bases of this kind of reduplication too must express an overall atelic event. This issue deserves further research.
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin Several authors (e.g. Hu 1994, Cai 2007, Li 2009) stress the fact that reduplication of monosyllabic nouns may be assimilated to classifier reduplication and that many of the nouns that can reduplicate show classifier-like properties. For example, Hu (1994: 103) observes that at least part of these (alleged) nominal bases can directly follow a numeral without an intervening classifier, as e.g. 一年 yī nián ‘one year’, 三戶 sān hù ‘three households’, and they can themselves work as classifiers, as e.g. 三戶人家 sān hù rénjiā ‘three household (clf) family, three families’, thus exhibiting properties of (nominal) classifiers. Reduplication of classifiers – how it is generally reported in reference grammars – seems to convey a distributive meaning: (20) 看書的時候，書上的字不可能個個都認識。 kàn shū de shíhou, shū shàng de zì bù kěnéng gè~gè dōu rènshi read book det time book on det character not can clf~clf all know ‘You cannot know all the characters/each character of the books you read.’ According to Paris (2007: 68), however, reduplicated classifiers get a (plural) distributive meaning when they appear in pre-verbal position (21a), while they get a plural collective interpretation when they occupy the post-verbal position (21b):17 (21)
a. 他個個學生都認得。 tā gè~gè xuésheng dōu rènde 3sg.m clf~clf student all be.acquainted.with ‘He knows all the students (individually).’ b. 在分析上遇見種種困難 zài fēnxī shàng yùjiàn zhǒng~zhǒng kùnnan at analysis on meet clf~clf difficulty ‘Come across all kinds of difficulties during the analysis.’
According to Zhang (2014), reduplication of classifiers in Mandarin is a type of plural marking; it denotes plurality of units (groups/collectives) rather than of individuals. Units and individuals can overlap, like in (22a), but it is not always the case, like in (22b), where ‘lotus’ is the individual, while ‘lotus pile’ is the unit that reduplicates (examples from Zhang 2014: 6): (22)
17
a. 河裏漂著（一）多多蓮花。 hé lǐ piāo-zhe ( yī ) duō~duō liánhuā river in float-dur (one) clf~clf lotus ‘There are many lotuses floating on the river.’
Paris notes that it is not possible to have the noun preceded by the reduplicated classifier in post-verbal position with the same meaning as (21a), so that the following sentence is ungrammatical: (i) * 他認得個個學生。 tā rènde gè~gè xuésheng 3sg.m be.acquainted.with clf~clf student
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano b. 地上有一堆堆蓮花。 dì shàng yǒu yī duī~duī liánhuā earth on have one clf(pile)~clf lotus ‘There are piles of lotuses on the ground.’ Zhang (2014: 12) argues that the distributive meaning emerges when reduplicated classifiers occur with the adverb 都 dōu ‘all’ (even when it is allowed but does not show up; see e.g. Guo 1999) or other kinds of adverbials: (23) 個個學生都有自己的網頁。 gè~gè xuésheng dōu yǒu zìjǐ de wǎngyè clf~clf student all have own det webpage ‘All of the students have their own webpage.’ In contrast, according to Zhang, in (24), where no 都 dōu ‘all’ is allowed, the distributive meaning is not possible (example from Zhang 2014: 12): (24) 雙雙情人步入會場。 shuāng~shuāng qíngrén bù-rù huì-chǎng clf (pair)~clf lover step-enter meet-place ‘Many pairs of lovers stepped into the meeting place.’ According to Zhang (2014: 12), the fact that reduplicated classifiers do not have an intrinsic distributive reading is proven by the compatibility with collective verbs. Going back to reduplication of monosyllabic nouns proper, Paris (2007) argues that it expresses a ‘plural collective’ meaning, more specifically it denotes a collectivity of elements sharing the same properties, which can function either as an argument or as an adverbial. According to Paris (2007: 69-70), reduplication of monosyllabic units does not have a distributive meaning, as shown by the contrast between (25a) and (25b), where the first one contains a reduplicated noun (天天 tiān~tiān ‘day~day, every day’), while the second contains the quantifier 每 měi ‘each’. In (25b) the object is necessarily distributed, i.e. it must be a different poem every day, while this is not necessarily the case in (25a).18 (25)
a. 他天天都讀一首詩。 tā tiān~tiān dōu dú yī shǒu shī 3sg.m day~day all read one clf poem ‘He reads a poem every day.’ b. 他每一天都讀一首詩。 tā měi yī tiān dōu dú yī shǒu shī 3sg.m each one day all read one clf poem ‘Every day he reads a (different) poem.’
18 Note
that in (25a) 都 dōu ‘all’ is used but, according to Paris, we do not get the distributive reading. This contrasts with what Zhang argues about classifiers, where the presence of this adverb would lead to a distributive reading (see above).
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin Providing a detailed picture of the kind of plural readings expressed by reduplicated classifiers is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, what we want to stress here is that it is not easy to trace a clear boundary between different kinds of plural readings and that arguably different readings can be related to distributional/syntactic rather than solely lexical factors. As for reduplication of disyllabic nouns, a first element is the undisputable categorial nature of the input, since classifiers are all monosyllabic. Structurally, nominal bases seem to be subject to the same morphological constraints observed for AABB adjectives and verbs. The AB base nouns usually entail a relation of coordination between their constituents: either logical coordination (see 26a), or synonyms or antonyms (26b) (see Tang 1979: 114; Zhang 2015 ):19 (26)
a.
家戶 jiā-hù family-household
→
‘household/family’ b.
老少 lǎo-shào old-young ‘the old and ‘the young’
→
家家戶戶 jiā~jiā-hù~hù family~familyhousehold~household ‘every family/each hold/many families’
house-
老老少少 lǎo~lǎo-shào~shào old~old-young~young ‘old people and young people’
As we have seen with adjectives (14), we can also find more lexicalized forms like： (27)
a.
b.
風雨 fēng-yǔ wind-rain ‘wind and rain/ ‘trials and ‘hardships’
→
點滴 diǎn-dī dot-drip/drop ‘droplet’
→
風風雨雨 fēng~fēng-yǔ~yǔ wind~wind-rain~rain
‘trials and hardships/storms’ 點點滴滴 diǎn~diǎn-dī~dī dot~dot-drop~drop ‘dribs and drabs/bit by bit’
The nominal AABB pattern of reduplication seems to be well-established in the Chinese lexicon (see e.g. Hu 1994, Wu & Shao 2001), and can be extended to disyllabic nouns that usually do not reduplicate (28a, Hu 1994: 106). Also, two monosyllabic nouns A and B 19
Note that some AABB lexicalized nouns do not have a AB compound counterpart (see Wu & Shao 2001: 12): e.g. 生生世世 shēng~shēng-shì~shì ‘life~life-generation~generation, generation after generation’(*生世 shēng-shì). Generally speaking, it is possible to form AABB nouns from the coordination of two items that do not form an AB compound (see (28b) and the related discussion).
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano that do not form a AB compound word, but satisfy the coordination requirements seen above, can reduplicate along the AABB pattern forming novel combinations (28b, see Wu & Shao 2001: 12): (28)
a.
b.
情景 qíng-jǐng feeling-scene ‘scene, sight, ‘circumstances’ 盆罐 pén guàn ‘basin/pot’ ‘jar’
→
情情景景 qíng~qíng-jǐng~jǐng feeling~feeling-scene~scene ‘every scene, all scenes’
→
盆盆罐罐 pén~pén-guàn~guàn ‘pots and jars’
According to Zhang (2015: 7), though, the AABB nominal pattern is not productive, since many acceptable compound nouns formed by parallel constituents do not reduplicate (she argues the same for verbs too). This is however questionable since e.g. one of the example she mentions, i.e. 桌椅 zhuō-yī ‘table-chair, tables and chairs’ → 桌桌椅椅 zhuō~zhuō-yī~yī ‘table~table-chair~chair’, is listed as an example of reduplicated AABB noun by Wu & Shao (2001: 12-13), who put it among AABB ‘temporary’ combinations with low frequency. Even though it is not easy to establish the productivity of a pattern, we believe that ‘occasional’ usages and the possibility to coin new AABB nouns are hints of its productivity. As for its function, as we have mentioned, Zhang (2015) argues that AABB expresses ‘greater plurality’ (see also Wu & Shao 2001), though it sometimes seems to have a distributive meaning, like in the case of reduplicated monosyllabic nouns; and, indeed, as we have seen, according to Xu (2012a), reduplicated AABB nouns indicate distributivity. See the examples below:20 (29)
20
a. 家家戶戶的門前都掛著青天白日滿地紅的國旗 […] jiā~jiā-hù~hù de mén-qián dōu guà-zhe family~family-household~household det door-front all hang-dur qíng-tiān-bái-rì mǎn-dì hóng de guó-qí blue-sky-white-sun full-ground red det country-flag ‘In front of the door of each household hung the red national flag with the white sun in the blue sky […]’ b. 海水浴場裡，男男女女、老老少少，都穿著各種不同款式的泳裝 […] hǎi-shuǐ yù-chǎng lǐ, nán~nán-nǚ~nǚ, lǎo~lǎo-shào~shào, dōu sea-water bath-site in man~man-woman~woman old~old-young~young all chuān-zhe gè zhǒng bùtóng kuǎnshì de yǒng-zhuāng wear-dur each clf(kind) different style det swim-suit ‘Every man, woman, old and young bathing in the sea was wearing all different styles of swimming suits’
Examples from Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese: http://app.sinica.edu.tw/cgi-bin/ kiwi/mkiwi/kiwi.sh [2016-11-24].
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin In any case, it is possible to argue that this reduplication pattern expresses a kind of plural and, indeed, Xu (2012a) argues that reduplication, like plural marking, is one of the major devices for indicating plurality in human languages.21 This plural displays interesting properties: it is compatible with ‘numeral+classifier’ constructions (30a) and, most importantly, it seems to be compatible with the plural marker 們 -men22 (30b): (30)
a. 200 多個子子孫孫前來祝壽 èrbǎi duō ge zǐ~zǐ-sūn~sūn qiánlái zhù-shòu 200 more clf son~son-grandson~grandson come congratulate-longevity ‘More than 200 children and grandchildren came to congratulate [the old woman] on her birthday.’23 b. […] 讓我們的子子孫孫們還能依靠這個地球生活。 ràng wǒ-men de zǐ~zǐ-sūn~sūn-men hái néng yīkào zhè ge let 1sg-pl det son~son-grandson~grandson-pl still can rely this clf dìqiú shēnghuó earth live ‘[…] to let the future generations still be able to rely on this earth to live.’ 24
From a typological perspective, it is interesting to observe that in languages where reduplication and classifiers are found extensively, plural marking is not well developed and is sensitive to the semantic feature [+human] (Xu 2012a: 12), just like in Mandarin (see Corbett 2000 for a more comprehensive overview of number marking across languages). Xu (2012a) further remarks that the more plural marking is developed, the less this semantic feature ([+human]) is required; also, the more a language possesses developed plural markers, the less it needs reduplication and classifiers. At the distributional level, the possible co-occurrence of AABB reduplication and of the plural marker 們 –men suggests that these two forms of pluralization cannot be equated, and, in a syntactically oriented approach to word formation and inflection, it indicates that these two plurals occupy different syntactic positions in the (extended) nominal projection. In particular, following Wiltschko’s (2008) analysis of plural markers in Halkomelem Salish, we will argue that the reduplicative process is a derivational process that operates at the root level, even before root categorization is determined. This analysis allows us to explain the otherwise unexpected occurrence of 們 –men plu21
Xu (2012b: 48) highlights some general tendencies in the languages of the world: 1) languages with obligatory plural marking tend not to have classifiers (see Greenberg 1972, Sanches & Slobin 1973; but see e.g. Bisang 2012); 2) languages without obligatory plural marking tend to use reduplication to express plurality. In general, languages which do not have plural marking seem to appeal to both reduplication and classifiers. 22 The plural marker 們 -men can be added only to human nouns; it is entirely optional and is generally used “only when there is some reason to emphasize the plurality of the noun” (Li & Thompson 1981: 40). It is obligatorily used only with personal pronouns. Moreover, if the noun is preceded by a ‘numeral+clf’, the marker 們 –men cannot be used: * 三個老師們 sān ge lǎoshī-men ‘three clf teacher-pl, three teachers’ (cf. 30a). This can be taken as an indication of the fact that 們 –men is a marker of pluralization connected to the determiner/classifier domain, rather than being involved at the NP level. 23 http://news.xinhuanet.com/society/2007-10/06/content_6833517.htm [2016-11-24]. 24 http://www.china-coop.org/index.php?ac=article&at=read&did=854 [2016-11-24].
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano ral marking on AABB (animate) nouns, which could be analysed as a modifier in the DP domain. We will go back to this issue in section 4.
3.4 Further remarks on the AABB pattern To sum up, the data above show that increasing AABB reduplication is sensitive to the morphological makeup of its input, and insensitive to the categorial feature of the base (Adj, V, N) or, semantically, to its ontological/sortal type (whether the base denotes a quality, an event, or an entity/individual). As for the morphological restrictions on the base units, it is worthwhile noting that the requirement of a compound base of a specific type is also category-neutral, since it is found with AABB adjectives, verbs and nouns. In particular, the kind of root combinations we find seem to have much in common with ‘co-compounds’, in particular, with the following categories singled out by Wälchli (2005: 138): ‘additive co-compounds’, as e.g. Georgian xel-p’exi ‘hand-foot’; ‘generalizing co-compounds’, as e.g. Mordvin t’ese-toso ‘here-there, everywhere’; collective co-compounds, as e.g. Chuvash sĕt-śu ‘milk-butter, dairy products’; synonymic cocompounds, as e.g. Uzbek qadr-qimmat ‘value-dignity, dignity’. According to Wälchli, additive co-compounds denote pairs consisting of the parts A and B; in a broader sense, they denote sets exhaustively listed by A and B. Generalizing co-compounds denote general notions (as e.g. ‘all’, ‘always’); their parts express the extreme opposite poles of which the whole consists. As for collective co-compounds, they are not always easy to define since they obey to different criteria, which do not always agree: the parts do not exhaustively list the whole; the whole comprises all meanings having the properties shared by A and B; collective co-compounds are co-compounds which denote collectives.25 Finally, in synonymic co-compounds, the constituents (A and B) and the whole compound have (almost) the same meaning. Wälchli observes that synonymic co-compounds “express homogeneous collection complexes in which (ideally) every element contained in them can be referred to by both parts of the co-compound” (p. 140). This, according to Wälchli, explains the affinity between synonymic co-compounds and plurality, though there is no language in which synonymic compounds work as fully grammaticalized plurals. Synonymic co-compounds may have affinities either to collective, to additive or to generalizing co-compounds. In any case, each type of co-compound described above may be considered as complexes where the referents are joint together to indicate a ‘set’. Interestingly enough, the AABB pattern can apply to AB bases that are not attested as coordinated bases (see sections 3.2, 3.3), and crucially it can be ‘category-changing’ (see Paul 2010: 145-146; cf. also ex. (9)): (31)
25
婆婆媽媽 pó~po-mā~mā old.lady~old.lady-mother~mother ‘kindhearted/sentimental/effeminate’
→
[AABB] = Adj
The example from Chuvash reported above meets all the three criteria, but it is not always the case. It is difficult to distinguish between additive and collective co-compounds if the first two criteria do not apply at the same time.
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin In (31), the AB base is not an existing word, but AABB reduplication applies to two free/non-conjoined lexical roots. Reduplication of two elements independently compatible with a nominal meaning26 results in an adjectival AABB lexeme. Furthermore, the AABB pattern extends to others categories too, like numerals, place words, coordinated classifiers, onomatopoeias, etc. (see Hu 1994): (32)
a. 千千萬萬 qiān~qiān-wàn~wàn thousand~thousand-ten.thousand~ten.thousand ‘thousands and thousands’ b. 前前後後 qián~qián-hòu~hòu front~front-back~back ‘whole story/ins and outs’ c. 嘻嘻哈哈 xī~xī-hā~hā giggling.onomatopoeia~giggling.onomatopeialaughter.onomatopoeia~laughter.onomatopeia ‘laughing and joking’
All these facts seem to support the hypothesis that the AABB reduplication pattern applies even before the conjoined bases get their categories (and indeed the constituents can be bound roots too).27 This is consistent with an analysis according to which word formation can apply to roots, or in this specific case, to combination/coordination of category-less roots, which would explain why, different from ABAB diminishing reduplication, it is a phenomenon found across almost all word classes.28 We will go back to this in section 4, where we will put forth an analysis for this reduplication pattern.
3.5 On the base units of AABB reduplications As we have seen in 2.2, diminishing reduplication does not form syntactic atoms and can be analyzed as a syntactic operation whose application is conditioned by structural re26
It is worth noticing that when the base is formed by a bound root constituent, like 婆 pó ‘old.lady’ in (31), we cannot determine its lexical category since bound roots do not occupy syntactic slots (see section 1.2); rather, it can be said that these roots are ‘noun-like’ semantically, i.e. they denote entities/individuals (see section 3.5). 27 A reviewer observed that it is difficult to make such a claim if the cases mentioned in this section are well-established lexicalized formations. Actually, these cases seem to be quite marginal, and for category changing items it is quite expected, since intuitively we expect that reduplication of two roots compatible with the nominal meaning leads to a nominal output. However, these examples further highlight the crosscategoriality of the pattern and further support the hypothesis of the acategoriality of the base roots. In any case, it is undoubtable that bound roots can enter this pattern of reduplication (see e.g. the reduplicated word in the examples (30) above, where both roots are bound), which as mentioned above (footnote 26; see also section 3.5) do not have a lexical category, and this points toward the acategorical nature of the conjoined roots. 28 Reduplication of non-existent AB bases is not possible with diminishing verbal reduplication; in ABAB verbal reduplication, the AB base must be an existing disyllabic verb.
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano strictions in the vP domain (see Arcodia et al. 2014, Basciano & Melloni 2017). In contrast, we have shown that increasing reduplication is subject to ‘morphological’ restrictions. Keeping in line with previous research on reduplication and plural marking, we argue that AABB increasing reduplication is the result of the modification of roots (see section 4), understood here, as in most exoskeletal approaches (see Borer 2003), like elements crucially lacking category features. Moreover, as we will show in details in the next section, AABB reduplications are syntactic atoms which cannot allow for the insertion of other material between the iterated units (see e.g. Lapointe 1980). Different pieces of evidence speak in favour of the hypothesis that AABB reduplication applies to elements smaller than a word, i.e. a root/stem, and possibly lack per se a definite category specification. In what follows, we will concentrate on the differences between AABB/increasing reduplication and other reduplicative processes to illustrate our point. First of all, let us consider the verbal domain, where we find both diminishing reduplication and increasing reduplication. A first crucial difference between the two patterns, namely ABAB and AABB verbs, concerns the distribution of aspectual markers. With AABB reduplicated verbs, if an aspectual marker is present, it follows the whole reduplicated verb (33a), as in the case of resultatives and other kinds of compound verbs (cf. fn. 4). In diminishing reduplication, as we have seen, the aspectual marker 了 le is unexpectedly placed between the base and the reduplicant (33b): (33)
a. 連老郭都進進出出了好幾次。 lián lǎo-Guō dōu jìn~jìn-chū~chū-le hǎojǐ cì even old-Guo all enter~enter-exit~exit-pfv many time ‘Even old Guo entered and exited from there many times.’29 b. 她試了試那件衣服。 tā shì-le shì nà jiàn yīfu 3sg.f try-pfv try that clf dress ‘She tried on that dress.’
A second piece of evidence comes from ‘rhotacization’ or erhua (兒化 érhuà), a morpho-phonological phenomenon that is very common in the speech varieties of Northern China, consisting in the addition of a retroflex approximant (兒 -r) at the end of a word. More precisely, phonologically, this suffix incorporates into the final syllable of a host stem replacing an existing coda, as e.g. 公園 gōngyuán → 公園兒 gōngyuár ‘park’, 鳥 niǎo → 鳥兒 niǎor ‘bird’. The suffix 兒 -r can appear in reduplicated adjectives, and in the AABB pattern it occurs after the whole reduplicated adjective: (34)
29
高高興興兒 gāo~gāo-xìng~xìng-r ‘really happy’
http://www.cctv.com/program/zoujinkexue/topic/science/C15580/20060413/100489.shtml [2016-11-24].
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin Lee-Kim (2016) observes that, even if to a lesser extent, this suffix can be also found in the reduplication of modifier-head adjectives (see 3.1). However, in this case the suffix attaches after each AB, i.e. AB-r AB-r: (35)
雪白兒雪白兒 xuě-bái-r~xuě-bái-r ‘(very) snow-white’
According to Lee-Kim (2016), this difference between the AABB pattern and the ABAB pattern, as far as the suffix 兒 –r is concerned, suggests that these two types of reduplication have a distinct internal structure. Assuming that 兒 –r adjoins to a phrasal node that introduces categorial information (n, v, a in DM), since it consistently occurs at the end of a full-fledged category, Lee-Kim argues that the contrast between (34) and (35) indicates that each AB forms an adjective phrase in the adjectival ABAB pattern of reduplication, while AABB as a whole forms a single adjectival phrase. She further argues that modifier-head compounds would undergo erhua before reduplication ([ABr]-RED), while coordinate compounds reduplicate before 兒 –r adjoins ( [AB-RED]-r). Since in the ABAB pattern 兒 –r adjoins before reduplication, the double occurrence of this suffix (AB-r AB-r) elegantly follows: reduplication applies to the whole suffixed compound AB-r, copying it as a whole. According to Lee-Kim, this also suggests that reduplication of modifier-head compounds is phrasal, while reduplication of coordinate compounds targets units smaller than a phrase. A corollary of this analysis might be that reduplication applies both to units below and above X°, but under this view it would be difficult to explain that there are no constraints on the gradability of the base, in the case of ABAB adjectival reduplication. An alternative and more feasible hypothesis is that the ABAB pattern instantiates another kind of phenomenon, which is well attested across languages (even those ones that lack productive reduplication), viz. contrastive focus reduplication/repetition. Different from ‘morphological’ reduplication, contrastive repetition phenomena involve the copying of full fledge words and sometimes phrases, as in the following examples from Ghomeshi et al. (2004: 308), and typically have no phonological/tone reanalysis or other types of morpho-phonological readjustment phenomena that characterize reduplication in a cross-linguistic perspective: (36)
a. I’ll make the tuna salad, and you make the SALAD–salad. b. My car isn’t MINE–mine; it’s my parents’. c. Oh, we’re not LIVING-TOGETHER–living-together.
The semantic effect of this construction is, according to Ghomeshi et al., “to focus the denotation of the reduplicated element on a more sharply delimited, more specialized, range” (p. 308). For example, in (36a) SALAD-salad denotes green salads as opposed to salads in general. Although the interpretive difference between increasing reduplication and contrastive repetition is difficult to get from our Mandarin-speaking informants, we suggest that
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano reduplicated adjectives such as 雪 白 雪 白 xuě-bái~xuě-bái ‘snow-white~snow-white’ might have a similar semantic effect, which is to express a prototypical, standard property denotation in the adjectival domain. As such, ABAB would be a different phenomenon applying at the phrasal level and crucially lacking the morphological constraints found with increasing reduplication. In contrast, the AABB pattern operates below the X° level and affects the gradable property of the base, i.e. it turns a gradable base into a no longer gradable one (see section 3.1). A further element which seems to support the status of the AABB reduplicated forms as syntactically atomic units30 is that they are often formed by at least one bound root (either A or B, or both of them) which cannot stand as a syntactic word by itself (see section 3.4, ex. (31) and fn. 26 and 27). For instance, in the example (37) the AB base is formed by two bound roots (cf. the free forms 兒子 érzi ‘son’ and 孫子 sūnzi ‘grandson’): (37)
子孫 zǐ-sūn son-grandson ‘children and grandchildren’/ ‘descendants’
→
子子孫孫 zǐ~zǐ-sūn~sūn son~son-grandson~grandson ‘heirs’/‘generation after generation of descendants’
This further corroborates the hypothesis that this process applies to roots, thus to acategorial elements; bound roots, indeed, have ‘nouny’, ‘verby’, ‘adjective-like’, etc. features, but, since they are not able to occupy a syntactic slot by themselves, they do not have a syntactic category proper.
4 Analysis Given the properties illustrated thus far, in this section we will propose that AABB reduplication is a phenomenon applying at the root level, as we briefly mentioned in section 3.5. In particular, in the previous sections we have shown that the AABB pattern applies across categories and even to non-attested AB units, can be ‘category changing’ (e.g. a coordination of two noun-like roots may result in an adjective), can be formed by bound roots, and displays syntactic atomicity/lexical integrity. We thus propose, along the line of Wiltschko (2008) and Zhang (2015), that AABB reduplication constitutes a modification/adjunction process which targets category-less roots.
4.1 Reduplication of (compound) roots Over the last two decades, frameworks of word formation, especially Distributed Morphology or Borer’s exoskeletal framework (2003), have taken very seriously the hypoth30
Whether they are category-less roots/stems or standard lexemes endowed with category features will be discussed throughout section 4.
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin esis that roots, as the invariant core of full-fledged words (stripped away of all morphological formatives) are category-less elements, and that they must be combined in the syntax with category assigning heads (see among others Marantz 2001, Embick & Noyer 2007, Embick & Marantz 2008). Under this view, lexemes/words never are atomic entities, but are the spell-out forms of roots selected by a functional head, i.e. a, n, v, determining the corresponding phrasal domain, so that: N = [n + √], V = [ v + √], A = [a + √]. Adopting this approach to word formation and its compositional analysis of lexemes, a possibility allowed by the system is that morphological phenomena traditionally described as ‘derivational’ do not actually target lexemes proper but category-less items, i.e. category-less roots. Increasing reduplication in Mandarin would then fall within the realm of those phenomena that apply at a very ‘low’ level in the morphosyntactic derivation, namely before categorization takes place. Leaving aside for the moment the complicating factor that the base of increasing reduplication is not a single root but a compound form made up of two roots (see section 4.4 for further discussion on this), under this analysis, it naturally follows that the whole reduplicated AABB form can be assigned to different lexical categories, in accordance with the ontological (/sortal) specification of the root, i.e. whether it denotes objects, events, or (gradable) qualities/attributes. (38)
a.
nP n
√root RED √root
b.
vP v
√root RED √root
c.
aP a
√root RED √root
In (38) we limited our representation to nouns, verbs and adjectives, but the analysis can be in principle extended to other categories too, like adverbs. The assumption that roots are atomic, non-decomposable elements virtually independent of the traditional lexical categories (i.e. roots are not associated with categorial information, as e.g.
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano nouns, verbs, adjectives; see Marantz 1997) allows for a unified analysis of AABB reduplication across categories. Under this approach, reduplication involves acategorial items, and categorization is determined afterwards, in accordance with the type of categorydetermining heads, i.e. n, v, a, and under the assumption that “whatever category can select for roots can also select for pluralized roots, because pluralized roots are still roots” (see Wiltschko 2008: 60). While we argue, along the line of Wiltschko (2008) and Zhang (2015), that a single structural analysis is capable to explain for all the category patterns of increasing reduplication, the interpretive outcomes of reduplication are still in need of a satisfactory analysis in the literature. As can be observed in other languages too, reduplication of nouns and verbs results is a (lexical) means of pluralization. The existence of lexical plurals, in particular, in the nominal domain is well attested across languages, with Italian, for instance, having a class of (feminine) nouns that are lexically specified as being plural (e.g. braccia ‘arms’, see Acquaviva 2008). As for the Chinese cases under consideration, according to Zhang (2015), AABB reduplication expresses overall a ‘greater plural’ meaning, which can apply both to individual-denoting and to action-denoting elements. In particular, this plural marker, according to Zhang, is integrated in the word-formation domain, where instead of categorial features, semantic features (see Cinque 1990, Lieber 2004, Lieber 2006) and probably phonological features, take part in the selection. Zhang’s analysis relies much on Wiltschko’s (2008) analysis of pluralization in Halkomelem Salish. Wiltschko proposes, based on different distributional properties, that in a language like English, with obligatory plural marking, and in a language like Halkomelem, with optional plural marking, plural markers differ in their ‘way’ and place of merging. While in English, as it is generally assumed, the plural marker spells out the plural value of a functional head selective for a phrasal node such as little n, in Halkomelem plural marking functions as a modifier of the category-less root: (39)
a.
English D D
#:PL #:PL
n n √root
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin b.
Halkomelem D n
D n
√root PLURALIZER √root
According to Wiltschko (2008: 688), modifying plural markers (39b) have the syntax of adjuncts, rather than of selecting heads, because of a set of properties setting them aside from functional plurals: they are not obligatory; they do not trigger agreement; their absence is not associated with a specific meaning, but instead is truly unmarked; they cannot be selected for; they do not allow for form-meaning mismatches. We argue that the root-adjoined analysis in (39b) can be the correct analysis for the Mandarin AABB reduplication under examination, where the ‘pluralizer’ is expressed by means of the reduplicative pattern itself, i.e. by means of independent phonological copying of both base units.31 This explains for several peculiar features of AABB reduplication, such as its non-obligatoriness and cross-categoriality, as well as its compatibility with the plural marker 們 –men, possibly used to emphasize plurality (see fn. 22), and with nominal classifiers. In particular, as we have noticed in section 3.3 (30b), reduplication and pluralization are not incompatible: (40) 子子孫孫們 (extracted from ex. (30b)) zǐ~zǐ-sūn~sūn-men son~son-grandson~grandson-pl ‘heirs/generation after generation of descendants’ Furthermore, the plural meaning of increasing reduplication is not merely ‘plural’: since it applies to a coordination of entities/individuals which are per se inherently plural (AB means the sum of the entities/individuals denoted by A and those denoted by B, see section 3.4), its meaning is that of ‘excessive/greater plural’. Another striking feature shared by Halkomelem Salish and Mandarin lies in the fact that their ‘lexical’ plural marking is not restricted to nouns, different from inflectional plural marking which is typically bound to nominal lexemes (not counting agreement plural marking, which can occur wherever it is required). This leads us to discuss the other lexical categories of the outputs of these reduplicative processes. As for the verbal domain, pluractional meaning of reduplicated verbs is certainly not exceptional in a cross-linguistic perspective. A great deal of reduplicative processes 31 The
intriguing issue of the peculiar phonological exponence of disyllabic increasing reduplication is left for future investigation, but we refer to Feng (2003) for an interesting analysis within Optimality Theory framework. See section 4.4. for further remarks on this.
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano across languages show a pattern close to Mandarin, where (increasing) reduplication in the verbal domain implies repetition/iteration of the event expressed by the base, hence operating over the verb aspectual structure. This means that increasing reduplication has an inherent quantificational meaning, resulting in a plurality of individuals or in a pluractionality of events, in compliance with the (vague) root meaning, ultimately determined by the type of selecting head, n vs. v, taking the reduplication as its complement (see (38)). Another property in common with nouns and, to the best of our knowledge, specific of Mandarin Chinese, is the need for a base composed of coordinated roots (especially in the case of verbs), standing in a symmetrical relation. We will come back to this intriguing issue in section 4.3.
4.2 Zooming in on adjectives Whereas the plural analysis seems to nicely fit the nominal and verbal domains of AABB reduplication, it remains to be understood what the interpretive analysis of adjective reduplication is. Interestingly, Wiltschko (2008) observes that in Halkomelem Salish the pluralizer (be it an affix, ablaut or a reduplicated form) occurs productively not only with nouns (41a, 41b), but with verbs (41c) and adjectives (41d) too (Wiltschko 2008: 641, 679680), conveying a meaning close to the one we find in Mandarin AABB reduplication:32 (41)
a. méle mámele child child.pl ‘child’ ‘children’ b. q’ámi girl ‘girl’
q’álemi girl.pl ‘girls’
qw’óleqw-et c. qw’óqw-et whip.pl-trans whip-trans ‘whip something/someone’ ‘whip something/someone several times’ d. kw’ós hot ‘hot’
kw’ó-kw’es hot.pl ‘real hot/very hot’
Wiltschko (2008) argues that, no matter whether it occurs in the context of nouns, verbs or adjectives, the plural marker is exactly the same. She further observes that, if the plural marker is exactly the same, we expect it having exactly the same meaning in each of these contexts. However, to determine what a root pluralizer denotes, we need to know what a root denotes, i.e. what its sortal type is. Wiltschko thus speculates that roots do not have a specific denotation (vs. nouns, which denote individualities, verbs, which denote eventualities, or adjectives, which denote attributes/qualities); they are able to 32
The reader should note that the unmarked form, here glossed as a singular form, is in fact compatible with both singular and plural interpretation; as we have mentioned, the plural marker is not obligatory in Halkomelem.
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin name “Events, Things, States and Qualities (see Harley 2005), and the pluralizer appears to simply assert that there are a lot of Events, Things, States, Qualities, depending on the nature of the √root” (p. 686). While this intuitive explanation in principle could work for nouns and verbs, it is nonetheless far less accurate for depicting the increased semantics of reduplicated adjectives. Looking at the semantic effects that reduplication has on Mandarin adjectives, it does not seem the case that it denotes ‘lots of Qualities’. Rather, it seems that AABB adjectives express ‘increased intensity’, thus affecting the gradable property of the base, and this seems to be true also for many other languages that exhibit reduplication with increasing semantics (with Halkomelem pluralized adjectives not counting as an exception in this domain, see (41d)).33 Since reduplication affects gradability, providing a greater/increased degree value expressed by the base root, we might ask what the interpretive relation is between increasing reduplication in the adjectival domain, on the one hand, and increasing reduplication in the verbal and nominal domain on the other, where reduplication is a means of quantification over entities/individuals and events.
4.3 Wellwood’s (2014, 2015) analysis of measurement functions across categories The analysis of adjectives, especially the fact that only gradable adjectives can be reduplicated, sheds light on the core issue of gradability/scalarity in increasing reduplication. However, as we mentioned in the previous section, the relation between increasing reduplication in the adjectival domain and increasing reduplication in the verbal and nominal domain still remains to be explained. In this section, based on the existing literature, we show that concepts of gradability and measurement, rather than being limited to the adjectival domain, may be applied uniformly across categories. This will help to support our hypothesis on the function of Mandarin increasing reduplication, namely that it expresses a unique function, i.e. ‘increased measure’, as will be discussed in the next section. While according to some authors gradability is a distinctive property of adjectives (see e.g. Jackendoff 1977), a great deal of research over the last decades found evidence of gradable properties across lexical categories (see e.g. Bolinger 1972, Bresnan 1973, Doetjes 1997, Neeleman et al. 2004, Caudal & Nicolas 2005, Bochnak 2010). As observed by Nicolas (2010), gradable expressions are found among: plural count nouns (more dogs), but not singular count nouns (*more dog, *less cup); mass nouns, concrete (more water, less wine) or abstract (more sadness, less playfulness); adjectives (smaller, less sad); verbs (to work more/less). Wellwood (2015) puts forward a unified account of comparison across categories, challenging those theories that consider gradable adjectives as elements specifying measure functions (see above) vs. nouns and verbs, which allegedly do not express such measure functions. According to this scholar, “which dimensions are possible across domains is a 33
According to Xu (2012a), reduplication is iconically motivated, and ‘positive degree’ constitutes its core meaning.
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano consequence of what is measured, rather than which expressions measure” (p. 69). Wellwood (2015: 69) also observes that a noun like coffee introduces individuals that can be measured, while a verb like run introduces events and an adjective like tall introduces states; in any case, they all can be measured along certain types of dimensions, specifically those which respect ‘part-whole’ relation (e.g. volume and weight for soup, but not temperature; time and distance for run, but not speed34 ). She posits a variable in nominal and verbal domains “that ranges over measure functions, restricted to just those that are homomorphic to the measured domain” (p. 68). Wellwood (2014, 2015) argues that comparative sentences in the adjectival, nominal and verbal domain all contain instances of a single (phonologically overt or covert) morpheme that compositionally introduces degrees; “this morpheme, sometimes pronounced much, contributes a structure-preserving map from entities, events, or states, to their measures along some dimension.” (Wellwood 2015: 67). This approach characterizes the notion of “measurement” uniformly in terms of structure-preservation across comparative constructions and unifies the contrasts existing (within each category) between gradable and non-gradable adjectives, between mass and count nouns, and between atelic and telic verb phrases.35 Wellwood observes that mass nouns tend to show cumulative reference: “if coffee applies to two portions of matter, then it also applies to the mereological sum of those portions” (p. 71). In contrast, count nouns, when interpreted singularly, tend to show non-cumulative reference: “if a cup applies to a given object, it fails to apply to any of its (relevant) proper parts” (p. 71). Therefore, the semantics of mass nouns is modelled in terms of a domain structured by the part-of relation, while that of a noun like cup lacks such structure. Similarly, atelic predicates (like mass nouns) tend to show cumulative reference, while telic predicates tend to show quantized, non-cumulative reference. If run in the park applies to two stretches of activity, it also applies to their sum; thus atelic events have domains structured by the part-of relation on events. In contrast, if run to the park applies to an event, it fails to apply to any of its relevant subparts; thus telic events lack the part-of relation (Wellwood 2015: 73). As for adjectives, Wellwood proposes that non-gradable adjectives, which express quantities that either exist or not (a table is either square or not, it cannot be more or less square) are formally parallel to (singular) count nouns and telic predicates, while gradable adjectives, which express quantities that there may be more or less of (a thing can be more or less hot), are parallel to mass nouns and atelic predicates. They both express predicates of states, the difference being that gradable adjectives, unlike non-gradable ones, predicate of ordered states: they associate directly with sets of ordered degrees, or scales. Besides, Wellwood assumes that the measure functions introduced with gradable adjectives are not only homomorphic to the ordering relations on the measured domain, but to non-trivial part-whole relations. 34
For example, she observes that larger portions of soup have greater measures by volume or weight than smaller portions, but generally this is not the case with measures by temperature. 35 Gradability presupposes the existence of a scale, and can be seen as related to ±boundedness (see Paradis 2001, Alexiadou 2010).
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin Therefore, instead of adopting a notion of ‘measurement’ based on a variety of measure functions acting on the same objects in unpredictable ways, Wellwood proposes that language encodes measurement of different sorts of things in limited ways. Accordingly, she elaborates a uniform account of measurement as a monotonic mapping from ordered sets of entities, events, or states to degrees.
4.4 Reduplication as increased measure Let us now try to combine the structural analysis of increasing reduplication proposed in section 4.2 with the cross-categorial (strictly compositional) analysis of measurement functions proposed by Wellwood (2014, 2015). Keeping with Wellwood’s proposal that there are no differences in the type of measurement functions among the lexical categories at a higher level of syntactic/semantic composition, we speculate that reduplication conveys a similarly stable/unique function but it targets elements lacking any specification in terms of formal features.36 In particular, we wish to argue that reduplication expresses a unique function, i.e. ‘increased measure’, that constantly applies to roots, only differing in their ontological denotation. Therefore, increasing reduplication is a very low-level (‘morphological’) adjunction operation which conveys the function ‘increased measure’ to the roots it applies to: the semantic effects obtained (pluralization, pluractionality, intensification of the base gradable property) ultimately depend on the different sort of things reduplication modifies, and arguably emerge constructionally, that is, after root categorization applies. It should be noticed that, semantically, similar results might be obtained at higher level of syntactic composition via different means, depending on the categorial domain of application, i.e. through fully-fledged degree phrases in the adjectival domain (see En. ‘very Adj’, e.g. very good; Ch. ‘很 hěn Adj’, e.g. 很高興 hěn gāoxìng ‘very happy’), and through the use of plural affixes and aspectual markers in the nominal and verbal domain respectively. This analysis, however, does not account for some relevant asymmetries across lexical categories previously noted in the literature (see Zhang 2015). As it has been argued in section 3, the main difference at the structural level between adjectives, on the one hand, and nouns and verbs, on the other, concerns the obligatoriness of disyllabic bases for the latter. That is, whereas increasing reduplication applies to quality-denoting roots that may be either mono- or disyllabic, resulting in AA and AABB patterns interpretively equivalent, with entity and event denoting roots it targets disyllabic units, resulting exclusively in the AABB pattern.37 As we have seen in 3.3, the AABB reduplication pattern requires a coordinate base, i.e. two elements related in a symmetrical fashion, either in a logical coordination, or synonyms or antonyms; thus, instead of having a single root we have a combination 36
It is worth reminding that roots have a strongly underspecified semantics which allows them to be compatible with the semantics of adjectives (as properties of attributes), verbs (as properties of events), nouns (as properties of individuals). 37 The generalization holds under the assumption that AA monosyllabic reduplication in the nominal domain should be rather understood as reduplication of classifiers (see section 3.3). We do not have an analysis of this type of reduplication yet, and we leave the issue for future research.
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano of roots. These roots are joined together to form a set, whereby the two constituents equally contribute to the semantics of the whole complex stem, i.e. they are in a symmetrical relation. Structurally, it is worth emphasizing that these operations all apply at the root level, resulting in a recursive application of ‘morphological’ phenomena, with (symmetrical) compounding and reduplication rigidly ordered in the derivation, yet both applying before categorization (see Zhang 2015): (42)
n/v/aP n/v/a
√root RED
A[AABB] n/v/a categorization
√root √rootA √rootB
A[AABB] reduplication
[AB] compounding
This analysis seems to produce the surface pattern ABAB, since reduplication applies to a compound base AB. However, prosodic patterns within AABB structures actually seem to support the structural analysis in (42). In particular, Feng (2003) examines tone sandhi rules within disyllabic reduplication and, for AABB, he argues that these rules apply first between the second A and first B and then between the first B and second B. On this basis, Feng argues that AB is the actual morphological unit, whereas AA and BB are not, resulting in the structural analysis [A[AB]B] (Feng 2003: 7-8). The issue deserves further investigation especially aimed at explaining the reason for the mismatch between underlying structure, supra-segmental patterns and surface order of morphemes, for which at the moment we cannot offer an explanation. Suffice it to say that the prosodic pattern of AABB provides evidence in favour of the analysis in (42). At the interpretive level, we put forward that the combination of two roots which act as the base for the AABB reduplication process forms itself a sort of ‘plural/collective’ expression and reduplication provides an increased measure for this kind of expressions. It has been noted that AABB nouns express greater plural (possibly differing in the semantics from AA reduplication of nouns/classifiers, most typically expressing a distributive meaning), and a similar effect is obtained with AABB verbs (ex. in (43a) and (43b) are adapted from examples (22, 24) in Zhang 2015): (43)
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a. 枝枝葉葉 zhī~zhī-yè~yè twig~twig-leaf~leaf ‘twigs and leaves’ b. 縫縫補補 féng~féng-bǔ~bǔ sew~sew-repair~repair ‘sew and repair repeatedly’
14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin A possible explanation for this structural requirement might lie in the different ontological type of roots: in particular, individual and event denoting roots, different from quality denoting roots, seem to require an inherently plural interpretation in order to be measured. As a matter of fact, typically comparative expressions with more in English require either mass nouns or plural nouns, but exclude singular nouns (more dogs vs. *more dog). Similar effects obtain in the domain of verbs with the contrasts between telic and atelic verbs discussed by Wellwood (2015). Although at this point the present analysis becomes very speculative, we put forward here that a principled reason for the necessary disyllabicity of nominal and verbal bases might have the same source of the asymmetry observed in the domain of comparative expressions. Specifically, if the semantics of roots is very vague and compatible with any interpretation which eventually emerges at higher levels of syntactic composition, a way to introduce gradability at the level of roots is to merge them directly, so to create a collection of individuals, like e.g. 男女 nán-nǚ ‘man and woman’ (which is reduplicated as 男男女女 nán~nán-nǚ~nǚ ‘men and women’), or of events, e.g. 起伏 qǐ-fú ‘rise and fall’ (which is reduplicated as 起起伏伏 qǐ~qǐ-fú~fú ‘rise and fall repeatedly’). In this view, the first merger provides reduplication with the ‘gradable base’ over which it can apply its increased measure function. On the contrary, roots that are selected by an adjectival head (i.e. a) would inherently express a gradable property and, accordingly, reduplication would not pose specific disyllabic requirements on these base units. Furthermore, if this is the case, we expect no difference in meaning between the reduplication of AA and AABB adjectival forms, as confirmed by the data (see examples (6a) and (6b) in section 2.1, repeated below for the reader’s convenience): (44)
a.
小 (A) xiǎo small ‘small’
→
小小 (AA) xiǎo~xiāo small~small ‘very/really small’
b.
高興 (AB) gāoxìng ‘happy’
→
高高興興 (AABB) gāo~gāo-xìng~xìng ‘very/really happy’
5 Conclusion Reduplication is a challenging phenomenon in many respects: it is hardly amenable to a uniform characterization in a cross-linguistic perspective, given the extreme variety of forms and functions it is associated with; further, it can surface with different forms and meanings within a single language too, as we have shown with the reduplicative processes of Mandarin under consideration; it can manifest semantic functions closely related to the inflectional/functional domain, but it approaches more closely the domain of derivation/word formation; finally, it can take as its base units elements of different size, ranging from lexeme/word-like units in one domain (diminishing reduplication,
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Chiara Melloni & Bianca Basciano which implies verbal reduplication in Mandarin) to category-less units in the other (increasing reduplication). The case of diminishing reduplication seems to involve units as ‘big’ as lexemes, i.e. stems endowed with category features and with specific (aspectual) semantics, as we have shown in section 2.1. The case of increasing reduplication, however, points to the existence of word formation phenomena that applies below the lexeme level. In particular, increasing reduplication seems to suggest that it is a phenomenon that can apply at a very ‘low level’, namely, that it can merge with roots/stems lacking category specification. Further, it is per se unable to express a definite category, given its presence across all major lexical categories at both input and output levels. Therefore, the present case study sheds some light on the existence of word formation that does not take lexemic inputs and does not give lexemic outputs either. On the one hand, this study brings further evidence in favor of a neo-constructionist/ DM-like view of the lexemes or word units as syntactically complex elements, and ultimately for the very existence of category-less roots. On the other hand, the curious asymmetries observed in the domain of increasing AA and AABB reduplication, whereby adjectives seem to part company from verbs and nouns, call into question the semantic (ontological?) character of roots and their alleged requirements for insertion in the syntactic structure responsible for category assignment and, overall, for their morphosyntactic properties and distribution. This is a very complex issue on which we hope to have contributed some further empirical and theoretical basis but that, it goes without saying, needs further research and ampler empirical coverage to be satisfactorily addressed. To conclude, our research has explored the structural and interpretive effects of reduplication, so productive in Mandarin (see Basciano & Melloni 2017) and broadly attested across Sinitic (see Arcodia et al. 2015) yet still lacking a satisfying analysis, despite of a growing interest in the last years. So doing, we hope to have paved the way for a better understanding of Mandarin reduplication specifically, and more in general for an approach to word formation which seeks to reinterpret morphology-specific properties and restrictions within a more integrated model of grammar, where syntax is also responsible for word formation.
Acknowledgments Dedication and acknowledgments To Bernard, who has never ceased to amaze us with his extraordinary intellectual vitality and authentic passion, a source of inspiration for us. The editors of this volume are gratefully acknowledged for inviting us to take part in this venture. We are especially grateful to Gilles Boyé for his insightful comments on a first version of this chapter. We also wish to thank Giorgio F. Arcodia for his careful reading of a first draft. All errors on the final version are our responsibility. Author contributions The paper is the result of close collaboration between the two authors, who are listed in random order. For academic purposes only, Chiara Melloni
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14 Reduplication across boundaries: The case of Mandarin takes responsibility for Sections 1, 3, 3.1, 3.2, 3.5, 4.3, 4.4, 5, and Bianca Basciano takes responsibility for Sections 2, 3.3, 3.4, 4, 4.1, 4.2.
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